Mail Order Bride: Springtime (Bride For All Seasons 1)

He had eaten quickly and efficiently, offering few pleasantries. Tension filled the air with an almost palpable thickness, and it was plain to see that his mind was elsewhere, other than on conversation. The inference was that something more important awaited his attention, and he needed to be up and at it.

When he had sopped up all the gravy with his bread, cleaned his plate, and sloshed down half a cup of coffee, he made ready to disappear again—despite the doctor’s demand that he wait to be accompanied wherever he was going. Ben had simply brushed him aside, as if he were of no more consequence than a buzzing cloud of horse flies.

He did, at least, in a rare and touching gesture, pause long enough to curve his palm over Camellia’s unwounded cheek. Ben had no need to speak any words aloud; his hazel eyes, softened by the day’s travail, said everything his heart wanted to share, but couldn’t.

Townsmen rarely went about the streets packing heat. Officers of the law were armed, of course; and most bartenders kept a sawed-off shotgun, a “scatter gun,” in a case of necessity, stowed behind their counters. Turnabout prided itself for being a quiet, sedate, and upstanding place, rather than a wild and wooly cow town needing bullets to calm things down.

For Ben to buckle in place a loaded gun belt and holstered forty-four, now, while he drew the doctor aside at the front door, was an anomaly that raised and tightened Gabriel’s thick brows.

“I need you to stay here as long as you can, till I get back,” he instructed in a very low voice. “I’m goin’ first over to the sheriff’s office. Then I’m headin’ out to find the Putnams, over to the Prairie Lot. If not there, then I’ll see if they’re holed up at that shack of theirs down by Juniper Creek.”

“And if they ain’t?”

“That’s the problem. Could be anywhere. Could be headin’ back here to have a second try at Camellia. And that’s what worries me. They gotta be tracked down, and they gotta be stopped.”

Gabriel tried one last-ditch effect. “Benjamin Forrester, you ain’t got the sense God gave a goose,” he complained in a harsh whisper. “You get the law after ’em; that’s Paul Winslow’s job. No vigilante justice, ain’t that what you’re preachin’ all the time? You got no business tacklin’ this without backup.”

They were of an even height, these two strong-willed and personable men. Hazel eyes met green straightforwardly, steadily, without wavering. “Toldja already, Gabe, this is my business. They went outa their way to cause hurt for my wife. They need to pay for it.”

Beware the fury of a patient man!

Gabriel was reminded of that famous line written by John Dryden, as part of a political poem considered to be the greatest in the English language. More true today than in the British dramatist’s seventeenth century lifetime. Especially where it concerned Ben Forrester.

Reluctantly the doctor stepped aside as Ben had yanked his hat down hard, gave a nod of farewell, and set off into the deepening dusk.

Per his friend’s earnest appeal, Gabriel had settled in for the evening to stand between Camellia and a possible harm’s way. He did extract one promise: that Ben would leave a note on the physician’s office door, directing anyone needing aid toward the Forrester house. Just in case.

And so, the three locked together at the scene of the crime, so to speak, quietly passed the evening. With the dishes washed and dried and the kitchen returned to order, they decided on a few games of whist played at the kitchen table, and desultory conversation.

“You keep yawning over your cards,” Hannah finally accused her sister. “Time for bed, and no argument.”

“And another dose of laudanum,” decreed the doctor.

Camellia gladly acquiesced. More so because this evening

she would not be alone in the house, with night terrors hanging around outside. The hours had slipped by for her in drugged slumber, and she woke next morning with a slight headache, a mouth seemingly filled by cotton, and a generally dopey feeling, as if she were living in a world under water.

Now here the two sisters were, with one administering to the other. Cloths pressed out of a basin of cool well water and applied periodically, as a poultice of arnica, to bumps and bruises. A hot cup of coffee to help start the day. A set of fresh undies, scented by lavender sachet, and a lightweight shirtwaist and navy cotton skirt.

“How’s everything?” she asked, with another yawn, confronted by someone wide awake and fresh as the morning dew.

“Dr. Havers is still here.” Hannah’s little moue and half-frown registered the same sort of discontent that the man probably inspired upon first contact with most females. “At least, I assume so, judging by the sounds emanating from your parlor.”

“I must wake up, I must wake up,” Camellia was muttering to herself.

“Have more coffee. He made it; the stuff would bring a corpse back from the dead.”

“That’s probably just what I need. My head feels like a stuffed sausage, and I’m having trouble clearing my thoughts. Please, Hen, no more laudanum, ever.”

“Well, at any rate,” sniffed Hannah, “he spent the night on your settee. I truly believed a herd of buffalo had taken up residence.” She was rooting in one of the dresser drawers for stockings and whatever other necessities might be needed.

Camellia was busy buttoning and tying and fastening, crossing this and slipping into that. “Please tell me you’ve been polite.”

“Of course I’ve been polite. What do you take me for, a savage? I even gave him a blanket and pillow before I came upstairs last night. And I have simpered like a good southern belle at him every time our paths have crossed this morning. Now, how are you feeling, other than a stuffed cabbage?”

“Sausage,” Camellia absently corrected. “Although cabbage would do, as well. Cut off my head at neck level, and I’m sure I would feel perfectly fine.”

“Ah. Teeth, jaw, cheek, eye, nose, throat—all still hurting?”